In today's shrinking world, an increasingly common problem involves moving funds between countries or between bank accounts. An existing process requires one to contact a financial institution and request a wire-transfer of funds to another institution. This process is lengthy, often taking from several days up to two weeks to accomplish. Further, requested transfers often may not go through as expected or intended. Even when requested transfers do go through, it sometimes occurs that funds are not handled properly by the institution receiving the funds.
In particular, the wire-transfer method incurs necessary delays in the input, transmission, authentication, and execution by the recipient business. For example, this method requires the requesting party to provide identification information which is inputted and then transmitted by the local financial institution so that it may be authenticated and approved by the customer's home financial institution. Thus, several opportunities are created for errors to occur which may subsequently result in a delay in the customer's request. Should errors occur, manual intervention and investigation then becomes necessary.
The transfer of funds between countries is especially complicated. For example such transactions are closely regulated by various governments. Accordingly, with any attempt to simplify the transfer of funds, a need exists to ensure that the system complies with pertinent government regulations.
Yet another complication with the international transfer of funds results from the use of different currencies. In particular, because the transferred funds should be in the form of a different currency than that used in the country of the transferring institution, it is necessary for the requesting party to be made aware of the applicable exchange rate, preferably before the transaction is consummated. However, this usually involves the customer having to calculate the equivalent value of the foreign currency.
Currently, most consumer banking institutions utilize a network of automated teller machines (ATMs) which permit customers to more readily transfer funds between accounts. This permits the customer to perform such transactions substantially in real time (without any necessary time lag for settlement). Some systems now utilize ATM networks to permit a customer while in one country to access his or her account in another country. However, these systems do not provide the benefit of enabling one to conveniently transfer funds from an account in a first country to another account in a second country.
Accordingly, there is a need to provide a more convenient and reliable system and method by which customers may transfer funds, particularly across international borders and in different currencies. More specifically, there is a need for a system which permits the convenient and reliable transfer of funds by a customer into another account. There is a related need to provide such transactions in a user friendly readily understood manner.